Editor Interview: Brink Books

hybrid literary

We’re big fans of publishers like Fonograf Editions, Fence, and Diagram. Rose Metal Press and the University of Nebraska both have amazing anthologies that have done so much work to elevate hybrid writing.

We love writers like Maggie Nelson, Amina Cain, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Renee Gladman (we were thrilled to have her judge our hybrid writing award in 2024)—the list goes on! A few of our favorite visual artists include Chelsea Mosher, Yanique Norman, and Sophie Paquette.

We prioritize innovative, boundary-pushing work across genres by both emerging and established voices while maintaining a curated, author-centered approach. It can be hard for full-length hybrid manuscripts to find a home because of time and effort that goes into both the design process and getting the books into the hands of readers who are interested in work that's outside the box. Because we only publish a couple of books a year, we can make sure each project gets the time and attention needed to create beautiful books that find their readers.

Brink Books gravitates toward work that’s innovative, genre-blurring, and bold. We look for manuscripts that push boundaries; however, craft, clarity, and deliberate structure are still essential. Our anthology, Malleable and True, is a great way to familiarize yourself with the Brink aesthetic, and it also includes prompts for creating your own hybrid work.

An ideal submission is one that feels fresh and alive, where the form itself is essential to telling the story. For example, our first single title, She Was Wild Grass by Katie Bennett, is a hybrid memoir that intertwines Bennett’s artistic coming-of-age with the story of Joan Vollmer, the remarkable yet overlooked Beat Generation figure whose life was tragically cut short when her husband, William S. Burroughs, shot her in 1951. We were immediately struck by how the book reframes Vollmer’s story, uncovering a hidden side of the Beat Generation while weaving it with a moving, contemporary artistic coming-of-age in prose that's both spare and evocative. The hybrid form enhances the narrative in a way that is simultaneously innovative and engrossing.

We're always surprised by the number of submissions we receive that aren't the kind of work we publish. Read the guidelines of what we're looking for on our submissions page, and if you still think your work might be a good fit, we'd love to take a look.

Usually we read the submission first, so cover letters aren't make or break for us. It's nice to learn more about the writer when their work catches our eye, though, including previous publications. We love discovering emerging writers, so a lack of publication history isn't an issue for us.

It depends on the book. If a submission isn’t aligned with our focus on hybrid work, or if it doesn’t feel ready for publication—it doesn’t have to be perfect, but it should be fairly polished and developed—we may determine early on that it’s not a fit. Otherwise, we read further to fully understand the work and its potential.

We go through several rounds of evaluation, and the books we end up choosing are read and agreed upon by the entire team. We only publish a couple of times a year and we're a small team, so we want to choose books that everyone is excited about.

As editor-in-chief, my days vary widely depending on the stage of a project or the publishing calendar. In general, our readers first assess the submissions for fit and readiness. I love then going through the reader reports, seeing which books are generating the most excitement, and taking a closer look myself.

We provide developmental editing, copy editing, and proofreading. Even the most polished manuscripts benefit from an editor's eye and some level of developmental editing.

Yes! We're new to books but we're compiling a list for future nominations, and we ask our authors for their ideas as well.

We're a nonprofit, so we're funded by a mix of grants, fundraising, and sales.

We take a holistic approach, working with the author to determine a plan that ranges from soliciting reviews and pitching features to posting on social media and setting up readings and other events.